The Association between the Volatility of Income and Life Expectancy in the United States

We examine the relationship between income volatility and life expectancy in mid-sized US commuting zones between 2006 and 2014. We use a commercial dataset, InfoUSA, to measure income volatility, which we link to estimates of life expectancy by gender, county, race, and income. We find that higher income volatility in a county is associated with lower life expectancy but only at the bottom of the income distribution and primarily for non-Hispanic Whites. Though we cannot extrapolate our findings to individual-level relationships, we do link them to existing literatures on place-based differences in mortality and the relationship between volatility and health.